Letters to the Editor 08-26-10

Thursday

Aug 26, 2010 at 6:07 AMAug 26, 2010 at 6:10 AM

Uncertainty is the enemy

Re: "Cynical Tax Cuts" (Our Opinion, Daily Press, Aug. 25).

The life or death of the Bush tax cuts does indeed cloud the nation's economic future. But that tax matter is just one of many uncertainties facing consumers and investors. And it's uncertainty that has stifled buying and investing beyond bare necessities.

The fact is, no one can predict what new taxing, spending or regulatory insanities will erupt from Congress or the administration tomorrow or next week. Unless and until consumers, businesses and investors have a clearer view of many tomorrows over the next several years, our economy will stay frozen in place, and the Great Recession will continue.

Jim Foy

Victorville

Our delusional senator

Got an e-mail from Sen. Barbara Boxer touting her support of small business via yet another deficit spending proposition. Is she kidding?

She's voted for forced health care mandates, fines and taxes, including the onerous 1099K requirement. She's refused to continue the Bush era tax rules, which will increase the taxes on my (and others) sole proprietor business by 30-40 percent. She's voted for spending at deficit levels that have sucked up so much capital that banks won't make small business loans anymore. The Obama policies she supports have frightened clients and customers into such paralysis that they won't spend money or hire services.

If she thinks any of that constitutes supporting small business, she is delusional. It will be my family's pleasure to contribute to Carley and encourage everyone we know to vote against Barbara Boxer.

Thomas Lecoq

Apple Valley

Another bubble forming

So now California's finances are being threatened by Wall Street gamblers manipulating the bond market with credit default swaps. Banks and investors gamble that California won't make it out of the recession.

Credit swaps, adjustable rate mortgages, sub-prime real estate loans, consolidated debt obligation bonds and a lack of supervision of the financial markets caused the 2008 Wall Street crash and should have been gone with the Obama administration's financial reform law recently signed. But these things are still here. All these "esoteric" instruments are still being used by Wall Street's thieves and gamblers.

Journalist Matt Taiibi explains credit default swaps this way: You sell a man a car with crappy brakes, then you buy a life insurance policy on him. This can happen to California because President Obama refused to regulate the industry. A panel of three experts examined the president's new financial reform law. MIT economist Simon Johnson, Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz and Bailout Watchdog Elizabeth Warren concluded that the new financial law lacks any real reform and insures another bubble and crash on Wall Street in "three to seven years."

A bond debt bubble can happen again because this president refused to stop what his predecessor started.

Tom Freeman

Pinon Hills

Facts and the 14th

Re: "Birth and citizenship" (Michael Sullivan, Letters, Aug. 15).

Mr. Sullivan wrote many words to invoke emotion but used no facts. Section one of the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, was written to overturn the wrong created by the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision, which stated that slaves and descendents of slaves would never be protected by the Constitution.

I challenge Mr. Sullivan to provide from the Congressional Record any debate regrading immigration and birth rights thereof while the 14th Amendment was being considered. I also challenge Mr. Sullivan to provide one proven credible leader of the Republican Party who advocates revocation of U.S. Birth Rights.

Where in the Constitution, i.e., the 14th Amendment, or the Bible for that matter, is U.S. citizenship declared a God-given right?

Constitutional scholars have argued whether the brevity of the amendments is a curse or a blessing. In 1868 Congress could never have foreseen the lure to the U.S. that our social programs would have on illegal immigration.

Does section one of the 14th Amendment need to be revised to address illegal immigration and anchor babies? Facts are needed for an open debate, not verbosity that creates hysteria in those easily misled.